The F-16A GROUND POUND Experience - War Thunder 

If you're picking anything up from the sale be sure to use my link to get my slick decal that's on the F-16A! store.gaijin.net/catalog.php?category=WarThunder&partner=Oddbawz&partner_val=2bpa5qx4

"I'm in real danger here" *Proceeds to dogfight with full CAS load*

Oddbawz - "Anti air is too good" Also Oddbawz - "All I've done is kill anti air" lmao

Is nobody going to mention the fact that Odd has Spookston's decal plastered all over his HSTV-L? And this is doubly funny since that's Spooks' favorite tank.

"I have no clue where that Maverick is going," gets the kill everytime anyways

Was honestly super bummed that they didn't do the F-15 first, but I guess the F-16 has been exported more so it gives them more wiggle room for filling out multiple trees. Some day, Eagle...

I just got the f-16a today and its my favorite plane to use, it has a really good turn time, good speed, and the cannons are even better.

The rumble noise from the missiles impacting each other at the start was so fucking cool man

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERONE! It’s day 174 of writing comments for the algorithm No.2

I love all this dramatic dialogue and music for an F16 in ground RB.

The crazy thing is that that first match’s CAS runs lasted longer than 99% of matches in top tier ARB.

The F-16 is one of the most legendary aicraft in history and it only took me about 30 years to realize that.

I would love to see you playing the Gepard 1A2, the stinger missiles have been buffed and work so well now, sometimes even when jets/helis use countermeasures they aren't affetced.

Could not agree with you more on your assessment of ground RB! No one likes having a good game in a medium tank ruined by a heli/jet that you never saw or even heard

Another thing about mid tear planes is a random tank can defend itself with a machingun

Definitely think that there should be a "Ground only RB" option to prevent GRB from turning into a plane fest.

I completely agree, as someone who doesn't find much fun playing any aircraft, top tier G RB is a nightmare to play, I just want to hop on my tank and engage in tank to tank combat. I have Aircraft too but I only bring it as an Anti-CAS at that point.

Thank you for mentioning what top tier has become after the intro! I've lost all interest in grinding beyond 8.0-9.0

It was always weird to me that Gaijin decided to add aircraft to ground forces. Ever since they talked about world war mode, which is enduring confrontation now, most of us assumed that random battles would stay vehicle type specific with combined arms being the big thing in enduring confrontation that would make it unique. But no... Gaijin decided to shoot themselves in the foot instead. It's a bit of a pattern from Gaijin... they added all those super pen ammo types to every vehicle possible which then ruined heavy tank game play and messed up the balance so bad that they had to remove tanks from the tech tree because "they can't be balanced". I don't mind the super pen ammo like heatfs or darts, but I think they should have only added where it's needed or if there was no other option historically. Yes, things like the PT76 won't be able to punch through the upper plate of a tiger without the 200mm of pen heatfs, but with it's thin armor and 100mm of pen APHE it could be at a much lower BR and still be fairly balanced. Instead, the PT76 not only has 200mm of pen with heatfs, but it's 13mm of armor is not enough to activate the fuse of a lot of the APHE shells that gets fired at it. Not that any of this matters. Gaijin only looks at their stats and their stats show people using and playing vehicles with these super pen ammo... which can only mean that we as the community must want more of this weird lobsided "balanced" nonsense... right?

I see you’re rocking the best skin for the HSTV-L. Love it!

The mavericks look like they're tracking incorrectly because of a long term bug that causes tank silhouettes the render a couple meters off where they actually are when at a long distance

It can carry more GBU's and ATGMs than the tornado and is faster and had better flight performance, and the tornados repair cost is higher! Much balance:)

I can't stop looking at the long-legged "Santa's Helper" in the hangar. Man, I need a date.

I agree with what OddBawZ said. It seems like every time I play my Israeli tanks, after the second vehicle it's not worth playing. It's killed before it leaves the spawn area. Granted I'm not the best player. But unless I take the M163 to help clear the skies. Even that it killed quickly sometimes. Basically I've been playing anything 6.7 or less.

I fucking lost it at the Asu-85 getting non-penned by a Maverick. That is just peak Gaijin right there.

Regarding the discussion on game balance, it’s a problem that can’t really be solved by BR tweaks or spawn point changes. It’s something that needs a fundamental shift away from the “capture three arbitrary locations” game mode. To truly fix the imbalance, they would need larger maps with dynamic objectives, including separate goals for ground and aircraft. Imagine loading into a match with the goal of securing a safe route for a supply convoy. The enemy’s had time to dig in, and you need to clear a pass through the mountains (frozen pass expanded for this) in order to make a path. About halfway through the match, you get an s as pert over comms telling you there’s an enemy base in the woods a bit farther on that needs to be destroyed, and you need to clear out the AA cover for friendly bombers. Meanwhile, your allied aircraft have been harassing enemy artillery positions, slowing the reload rate (increased cooldown for enemy artillery strikes) and helping to keep you safe. Giving air and ground forces separate objectives that still help support each other while giving you goals to achieve for points would go a long way toward fixing the fundamental problems the game has.

You can see and lock enemies from 7km away using the maverick's camera.

One of the biggest problems for top tier SPAA players is the maps. Sometimes you get spawns with zero cover visible from across the map, sometimes you get cramped little areas surrounded by buildings and contested streets, and every now and then you get a map where you can actually move out of spawn and set up in a somewhat concealed area that isn’t bound to be flooded with enemy tanks. All of those negative factors make it much easier for CAS players to overwhelm SPAA players, because they might be preoccupied with checking their surroundings for tanks or they simply can’t move from spawn without exposing themselves. I’m not saying SPAA should never have to think about enemy tanks presenting a threat, what I’m saying is that people who go out of their way to support their team by spawning in SPAA at the start of the match should have more options than just sitting in spawn. I’m really worried about SEAD weapons being added to the game. I’d argue that CAS already has a lot of advantages over SPAA, and already has the means to tackle them without much fuss. (So long as you have something fast with CCIP, at the very least) Most people already don’t enjoy top tier tanks very much, and all I think SEAD will do is scare away more of the player base.

The A10 is definitely under BRed for tank battles as CAS. 6 fire and forget missiles at 10.0. You look at the SU25 and it has 6 laser guided missiles that you need to basically follow in so the missile doesn't lose the firing window, and then the scope for it is so horrendously bad you need to get dangerously close to their SPAA just to have a chance of seeing a target, and by that point you're dead.

I haven’t used mavericks in ages because the glide bombs have always killed in one hit until recently. If you have assault fuse on with American glide bombs you won’t kill anything over a medium tank

From what I can see, the mavericks work well below mach 1, but get real unresponsive after. You could start the dive slower and higher while using your targeting sight to pick enemies.

larger battlefields and bigger matches, so spaa cover is more effective in certain areas and players have to play strategiacally, its not too difficult to imagine a new gamemode with much larger teams and battlefields, more spawns and so on. i think that would make it more interesting, would be more difficult, and take longer, but would be arguably more fun because the spaa and air battle wouldnt get stuck into a small space and every plane rushing to get kills and more ground spawns and more players on the map would mean planes are less annoying. more players = more spaa, planes could be more expensive as well and given a longer game i dont think that would be stupid. but maybe i'm wrong, but i think its worth a shot. sling in 8 caps and call it war or domination or whatever you can get away with without a cod copy right issue lol.

Hope you’ve had a good Christmas odd, much appreciated all the work you’ve done this year keep up the good work boss man.

It is quite funny the length gaijin has to go to to nerf CAS at high tier to make the game work. It's almost like a WW2 tank game wasn't built for modern air power, which is proven to dominate. It's honestly comical at this point, they should just admit that it's arcade and make the game actually fun, rather than fucking vehicles up for the sake of balance.

Gaht damn the F-16 is such a gorgeous plane

the most replayed part is the guy that teamkilled you in the video 💀

Good health and happy holidays to you sir! Thank you for all the great entertainment this year and good fortune to you!

I love the Spookston camo on the HSTV-L

So glad you’re back! Love the vids!!

The fact I have to look up your videos and not have them pop up in my feed is criminal.

I honestly don’t think CAS is too big of an issue. I don’t use it very much beyond low tier, and it’s very rare in my experience that a single player takes over a game with CAS. Believe it or not, CAS does require a decent amount if skill, even at top tier with all the automated systems. If anything, the most annoying things are helis, but they’re very easy to shoot down with anti-air which I spawn right after dying to one.

Damn the tunguska used to be so good, sky guardians really murdered it.

Exactly THIS!! this what i have posted on reddit about planes SP are to low and cheap to spawn and I've got down voted to hell and ppl started calling me shit like "tanker main brain dead, spawn in a fighter..etc" being a heavy CAS player myself got me tilted which made me delete it...

Oddbawz when he can't mindlessly kill helpless tanks on the ground with his plane:😭😭😭

The F-16 can climb up and drop its guided missiles/bombs from 10km away from the battlefield. Most SPAA won't even notice you

It might be difficult, but damn is the F-16 a fantastic looking airplane. Made me real sad when we replaced them here in Norway. Looks so clean and crisp.

After seeing some pretty quality dogfights in ground RB I’ve been thinking about if removing enemy markers/spotting in top tier air RB would be a move to possibly slow down the 5 minute one sided steamroller clusterfuck meta thats going on atm. With top tier jets having radar and sensors + being fast af, spotting just isn’t the necessity it is when you’re flying a Fw 190 with no sensors around a map that’ll take you 20 minutes to get to end to end. Anybody else have thoughts on this?

I'd argue that the ability for a good pilot with a CAS loadout to completely destroy a push by themselves more than justifies the high spawnpoint cost. The fact that you spent basically half the video launching missiles at SPAA and tanks in or leaving their spawn from nearly directly above is also a pretty good example of why SPAA needs to be so powerful (and in my opinion, is not powerful enough), since if they miss one plane it can potentially lock half the team in the spawn for the next few minutes but if a plane with a standoff armament misses their shot on an SPAA, they can often just disengage and try again until they hit it.

I bring the F-16A with the 6 AGM-65 and the 2 GBU-8s. Prob the best CAS aircraft out there.

Merry christmas y'all :)

Now that we have the F16 in game. F18s won't be far behind. I want independence day scenario

seems to me at any rate that most top Br problems come from small maps and small teams, aka the match doesn't last at all, so it just turns into a huge cramped mess and then its over. and it would also be cool if they then also made artillery more realistic with call out mechanics and firing solution mechanics, basically you get a way to adjust fire properly and manually lay down arty, that would be really cool. i saw some of you guys cheese it, but it if was proper long range with coordinates and having to aim that would be cool.

i agree SPAA and Air Craft of every kind should go up in spawn point but only after 6.0

OddBawZ is becoming the Apex Predator! 😎

Your points on Aircraft really reflect a bunch of different problems caused by a mixture of Gaijin half-assing things as usual and some real world constraints outside their control. In reality with Mavericks and the like in the game aircraft should be spawning a lot higher and a lot further back, but they should also be coming as standard with the targeting pods they had/have IRL. But if Gaijin did that the lack of any real world implementable, (for the most part, the russians have a few systems), SPAA that could engage them would start to show. On the flipside those systems are highly reliant on radar and/or IR and are thus vulnerable to countermeasures and/or ECM, (another unimplemented feature). It's basically a giant mess that ends up favouring aircraft heavily, mainly because serious SPAA development largely stopped with the end of the Cold War, (And the west had most of it's late cold war programs never make it out of the development phase. The M247 was cancelled the same year the F-16 entered service and 5 years after the M1A1 entered service for an idea of timescales.

Merry Christmas, Odd!

No one has commented that his HSTV-L is covered in Spookston's decals. That cracks me up for some reason.

Powerfull SPAA is my favorite word combination

Nice vid! F16 looks so strong. Where do u think the F15 and F18 will sit in the tech tree?

I've watched this video 12 times now and can confirm this is f-16a free bird but it's not so free

Merry Christmas Bawz!

Merry thiccmas 😊. you know what is back.

The main reason CAS is such a plague on ground RB is because of the extremely poor state of Air RB. You get more opportunities and more time to use your aircraft in ground RB than you do in Air RB all at the expense of players who haven't bought a premium plane or spent literally months grinding to a higher tier aircraft. Fix Air RB, limit fuel and aircraft spawns in Ground RB.

everytime im in a jet, i get instantly clapped without being able to even play the game, sometimes i see planes flying above the map for like 7 minutes and nothing happens, i spawn in and get shot by a missile

the balancing on top tier should come from the way combined arms is played by a team to win games, not by spaa vs air in a head to head one player vs one player.

I am currently grinding the Gerard and when I unlock it any plane in the shy shall vanish. Just you wait lol

I’ve been playing war thunder for years now. I don’t even wanna play pubs with top tier. I’d love 1v1 and private match baffonerie with these plane I’m never gonna bother researching

Out of all of this, what caught my attention was that Gaijin put Elk (Wapiti, not moose) in as Christmas decorations and not Reindeer. Which is kinda strange.

Merry Christmas here in Scotland oddbawz 🎅🎄🎊

Merry Christmas BawZ :)

*cries when pantsir shoots me down 0.5sec after spawning in a plane*

War Thunder top tier is best described as a place where you get that same no skill required, headless chicken playstyle as you would in some unbalanced, overpowered vehicle at midtier, except you're still an easy kill, so you'll die a lot too. It's the worst of both worlds but on paper it's "balanced". Especially planes. I fly mostly, but man, anywhere over 9.7 it becomes so much Missile Thunder that the game just plays itself with minimal human interaction, and it's the War Thunder equivalent to the part in the Wall-E movie, when we're introduced to the spaceship, where the peak of human physical activity is pressing a button to make things happen.

Merry Christmas Odd! ;)

I know it's not as entertaining ro viewers but climb to 10km and dive 90 degrees and drop GBUs on SAM (target ito and flarakrad cus u can dodge 2s6 and Tor easily) and support friendly pushes using the mavericks, a good pass with zero throttle and AB at 10km (or higher) can turn the tide of a battle

It’s not as much SP because SPAA doesn’t ruin the game for half the enemy team. CAS is such bs

All I want for Christmas is Helicopters and ATGM drones to go away. I had a game were I was drone striked 3 times and killed by Ka50 the other 2

Merry Christmas Odd.

As someone who basically only plays ground, and what I consider my worst mistake in gaming: mainly Germany, CAS is such a pain in the ass. Knowing that killing a British or American tank means almost certain death from the sky for at least 1 person on my team is mind breaking. Even worse is when you get the fabled slightly competent or better German team and head into the second half of the game winning, only for the allied CAS to fucking bomb your team to the stone age. Having a full line up of non-SPAA tanks taken out by planes, especially in spawn, is rage quit inducing and why I'm writing this instead of currently playing. The whole Aral Sea section is kind of a perfect example. Bawz does laps over the enemy spawn and whenever something spawns he bonks it, and it only gets worse at low tier where even .50cals pen the roof of most vehicles, and cripple if not outright kill most SPAA. Of course I know Bawz knows this so I guess this is just a rant to blow off steam after some gruesome games.

Merry Christmas 🎅 and a much better new year to all

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Ah- Aurora Borealis!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your hangar!?

that intro was sickkkk

Simple resolution to the neverending CAS/SPAA problem...GIVE US A GROUND ONLY MODE GAIJIN. Jeez.

We need HARM and sidearm missiles so we can do effective wild weasel and SEAD.

Merry Christmas 🎅, have a great new year

Have a great Chrimbo Odd

See I think we should have 3 modes for RB Air - Air/Ground - Ground. Then when I want to play tanks I won't get bombarded all the time

A---Aurora Borealis? At this time of year! At this time of day! In this part of the country! Localized entirely within your hanger?!?

Prior to the addition of helicopters, CAS was fine. People would moan about it, but it really wasn’t a big deal. SPAA at the time did a pretty good job of dealing with the (barely) supersonic offerings at the time, and most decent CAS vehicles were subsonic, leaving them very vulnerable to SPAA and dedicated fighters. Then they added the helicopters, suddenly the CAS balance was retarded. No SPAA could reliably deal with helis. So they added things like the Tunguska. Great, now nobody gets to play aircraft at all. Then they added the ka-50/52 and broke heli balance again. So they had to add progressively more and more oppressive SPAA to counter the retarded 8-10km engagement ranges of helicopters. Emboldened by this absolute cluster fuck, gaijin felt they could add more and more powerful CAS aircraft, because the SPAAs to deal with them exist. Except they only exist for some factions. The most egregious CAS vehicle was still the ka-50. Of USSR. People are complaining, what do? I know, add an SPAA that can kill the ka-50 easily! To the USSR. Now the Pantsir exists, and literally nobody gets to fly anything except Russia, who still have to avoid the very oppressive SPAA, but they get to do so above the battlefield. Everyone else gets Pantsir’d as they spawn.

that intro was amazeballz 4

Hey odd I hope you have a merry Christmas 🎄

Holy crap! What an intro.

A joyous addition to an already excellent evening🎄🎅 Happy holidays to everyone!

i hate how everything makes smoke big enough to cover ur scoped view

I hate Top Tier SPAA but at the same time I want it to be OP against aircraft because CAS shouldnt be able to just kill the entire enemy team unhindered. Its in a weird spot rn tho because you might as well not even bring in a jet into Ground RB

Especially at around 7.0 CAS is designed very poorly in this game... It makes sense that it's there but the problem is that it promotes toxic gameplay (spawn camping, revenge suicide bombing) and after you went out and picked your free kill(s), you can just go back to playing tanks... It's too high reward for the risk. The other reason why it's poorly designed is that playing SPAA just doens't really feel good. At the early yet/ late prop area, it's SO much harder to shoot a plane than being shot by one, that people nearly only take out SPAA if it can take out tanks as well. So if the SPAA can take out tanks, it will be "miss used" to kill tanks and not aircraft and if it can't reliably take out tanks, it will simply not be used. So you more often than not have 3-5 planes over your head spawncamping everyone, if they haven't thrown away their plane for the suicide revenge bomb. All in all, that's my experience from the last few 100 games over the past couple of months.

Is there a reason you don't use auto jettison? Just asking because I really appreciate the game automatically detaching used rocket pods, bomb racks, missile racks, etc when they're empty.

The Dagor engine just isn't ideal for present day jets where your supposed to be firing your ATGMs from over the horizon or 10 miles away at the closest using data links and such.

Merry Christmas bro

Yeah, I live around 3.7-6.3 range. Once missiles start nailing me in spawn, it’s not an enjoyable game.